Al - Moderator

There's no way to really know how many available grafts you have because what you have now may not be the same as what you have in 15 or 20 years. Let's say you have 9000 grafts available today and you have a session of 2500 to strengthen your front a bit. Maybe 5 or 10 years later you need another 3000 to fill in additional loss behind the hairline and a bit in the crown. You're thinking you have 3500 grafts left, but in another 5 or 10 years when you need more work, the donor may be starting to thin a little and you may only have another 2500 grafts instead of 3500 like you thought. Right now your donor may look great, but that can change over time, so anyone who gives you a number of how many grafts is just taking a guess. Don't rely too much on it.

LETSC, I hope it works out for you. I've had some horrible hair transplants from 20-25 years ago as well, so I know what you mean about not having the confidence to try to make it right. There's always that fear of making it even worse. Good luck to you.

I'm going to disagree. Working out has always caused my hair to fall out faster. I've never taken any kind of steroids, protein shakes, muscle building pills, etc. and I'm not on any medication. From back when I was 15 or 16 and just starting to lift weights in high school (I wanted t be a body builder) my hair fallout has always noticebly increased when I was working out. It would start maybe a week after I begin working out and the speeded up fallout rate would continue for a few months until I got so depressed that I'd stop working out. Then the fallout would slow down. This went on for years. I even stopped working out for several years and that was the slowest rate of fallout I ever had. Over the last few years I've been trying to lift weights again and of course the fallout increased again and slowed again when I stopped. At this point, I'm now 45 and don't have much hair left, so I'm more concerned about my body looking good since there was never anything I could do about the hair. I've been working out on a regular basis for about a year, which is the longest non stop time I've ever been doing it, and my hair fallout has increased ever since and has not stopped. I am completely convinced that my hair falls out faster when I lift weights or work out.

You should be rubbing the shampoo on your scalp. It's better to have a clean scalp. Any hair that comes out during shampooing was going to fall out anyway. You're just making them come out all at once rather than slowly falling out one at a time during the rest of the day.

Yes. I'm pretty sure I hold the record by far. This was a long time ago. I had 25 HT sessions which included 5 scalp reductions done between 1989 and 1994. I averaged one HT surgery about every 2.5 months for about 5.5 years. It brought on some major depression. Not from the hairloss, but the constantly having surgery and always being in the shock loss, waiting for hair to grow, doldrums period. I was at the point where I kept getting sick and having anxiety attacks just thinking about the next surgery. I wanted to kill myself, but as I said, not because of the hair loss. Any time I made a suggestion of what I wanted done or how I might want the hairline to look, etc, I was told I was an extreme case and they were the Dr.s and I was in danger of permanently losing all of my hair unless I did exactly what they said. They told me several times that I was crazy for suggesting how a Dr should perform surgery and that if they did what I wanted it would be my fault if it didn't turn out correctly. Prior to the HTs I had been losing hair since mid teens and it was falling out in clumps as I got to around age 19. I had stinging pain all over my head even if I just touched my hair. It was painful just to comb my hair. At that time just running my hands through my hair would give me a handful of hair. The scalp reductions were supposed to cut out the affected area so it couldn't keep spreading. I find it amazing that some people come here in their mid to late 20's with a bit of mild thinning and are panicking about what to do. I wish I had that "problem". I would have never even thought about having a HT if I was slowly thinning and aging normally.

The short version: I was losing my hair by age 15. At first my mother thought I was pulling it out myself. As it progressed, she said I needed to go to a dermatologist because her brother (my uncle) had a skin/scalp disease when he was young that caused all of his hair to fall out. The "Dr." said I had an "excessive hairloss disease" that had already progressed pretty far and if I didn't do something about it as soon as possible, I would lose all of my hair and never have any chance of getting any of it back. I then went through 25 hair transplants in an attempt to cure my condition. The first 23 were done before I knew it was MPB and the person was not a Dr. The last 2 were done by someone else in an attempt to correct the mess and make me look a bit more normal, which didn't work very well.

The numbness on the top of my head has never gone away and it's been approximately 23 years since my first HT and 18 years since the last one.

A strip scar, NW 7, no donor left, unable to cover the scar with existing hair. I have that and it's not something you want, believe me.

What happens when someone who thinks that way has a HT and then later ends up with what would have been a NW7 ? Then he still has thinning hair and keeping it long looks like a combover. Going back to cutting it short and the scar shows. What do you do then? I would love to be able to get a normal haircut!

This is the type of HT I need. This definitely gives me some hope. Thanks for posting this. Can we get any ideas of cost involved in these types of HTs?

Right. There's been a lot of hair cloning and other such testing in mice. You'd think they would have at least tried cross transplanting on them.

Why? You know that 2 and 3 hair grafts occur naturally throughout your head of hair, so why is it a major concern if you get a couple of 2 hair grafts in the hairline after a transplant? You had them there years before when you had more hair in that area and you never noticed or cared, so why do you now?

I think hairthere and Sean are incorrect. There is always a percentage of hair that's in the phase where the hair has fallen out but a new hair hasn't yet begun to grow in that follicle. In that case what looks like a single hair graft can actually turn out to be a 2 hair graft. I'm imagining this scenario is more likely to occur with Drs who use fat grafts (meaning they don't trim all of the excess tissue around a graft). I'm thinking when the tech trims the tissue they may damage the portion of the graft that would have grown the additional hair, so it may not happen very often in those cases.

Corvettetester stated that "Hair loss is not a disfigurement". I tend to disagree with that although I do think there's an age factor involved. If it wasn't a disfigurement then why is it when a Dr performs a HT on a young kid maybe 8 or 10 years old who had hairloss for whatever reason do most people here feel the Dr was doing a great thing, was compassionate, helps the child not have to face ridicule or criticism, or helps the child's well being, etc? If it was normal and not a disfigurement, we wouldn't feel that? Would we?

richie48, Your clearer way of saying it doesn't really say anything at all. If you were one of the people who were not candidates for HT because of a high level of hairloss or diffuse thinning all over, you would not agree with your statement. You believe your statements are true only because they happen to be true for YOU. If I didn't lose any more hair after the point of starting my first HT then my HT would look so much better and would have been at least somewhat successful. However that is not the case. Here's another way of looking at it. I've heard that about 20% of people get turned down for HT by the better Drs. If that's the case then that's 20% right off the bat that don't fit your statement of there being a safe zone, or at least not enough of a safe zone to matter. That's not even counting the percentage of people who don't even go for consultations because after researching they realize they probably aren't candidates. Out of those who have HTs I'm guessing about 20% will eventually end up losing donor hair and transplanted hair to the point of not being able to cover the scars or have enough up top to do a decent style. That's around 40% of men who are not a good fit for a HT. You can disagree with my percentages as I've not studied it, but I hope you get the point. You can't look at ONLY those who have had a HT and leave out the ones who haven't had one. I can easily say 100% of anything is true if I've already weeded out all the ones that will be false.

I still have people telling me if my hair bothers me so much I should just get a hair transplant or just go back and get it fixed. If it was only that easy.... Then there are those who tell me to give up and shave it all off. While I don't want a shaved head, I'd certainly be willing to try a buzz cut if I didn't have all the scars. They tell me these things as if I don't have a clue what I look like. Idiots.

I've always been against weighting the hair (placing more grafts on one side) because it forces you into doing an obvious comb over by keeping your hair super long to cover the side that didn't get the grafts. This is the look everyone who has a HT is trying to avoid or get away from. Why in the world would any Dr. ever do this? I never understood it. However, I also always felt that if a person had enough hair from a HT that they would try different styles. If you only get the frontal 3rd done then you're not going to have enough to style or comb forward, etc because you don't have any hair in the crown. It's easy to show pics of people with different hair styles, but the fact is that most HT patients don't get the amount of hair to pull off those styles. I would love to have enough hair to style my hair differently, but I don't.

I always looked at hair since I was a little kid. I didn't understand how my uncle could be completely bald, yet be younger than my dad who had a full head of hair. He looked so old to me. I wondered what happened to him. I was thinking that as far back as I can remember and always looked at everyone's hair trying to compare them all. As for the combover, I do it because I have no choice after some horrible HTs.

My cholesterol numbers are great. I was a NW 6 by age 20. I don't think the cholesterol makes a difference.

FALSE. The hair will be affected by DHT the same way as it would have been if it hadn't been moved. I'm 44 and my donor area has thinnned considerably over the years and so has the transplanted hair. If you're going to end up a high NW level at a relatively early age then HT fallout, donor thinning, scar showing through does happen.

No. Don't believe anyone who tells you that you can get FUE once the donor is maxed out. If the donor is maxed out then you're already looking at not having enough hair above and below the scar to cover the scar. Taking out more grafts by FUE will only make the scar show even more.

The kid is 15. What's going to happen in a few years when he starts getting normal temple recession and maturing hairline? He'll have the recession on the other side and the side worked on will still be growing. Isn't it just going to be uneven again at that time? I had more hairloss than that when I was 15.

I can't understand how doing FUE in a depleted donor area can work. If the donor area is depleted wouldn't doing over 1100 FUEs just make it look worse? Why/how would it not be better to do a strip?

I had first HT in 1989 when I was 22. The last one was in 1994. It never looked good. I'm 44 now and I'd say about 30% or more of the transplanted hair is now gone and it continues to fall out. It was not permanent. The total balding area on my head continues to widen. The hairs that are still remaining are thinner than they once were. The donor area in the sides and back (so called safe zone) has been slowly thinning for years. I'm unable to cover the scars no matter how long I grow my hair because the hair just isn't thick enough.

Even if you fill in the frontal 1/3 and it looks great after one session, you may still need another session later because your sides will recede back and the bald area on top will widen. You will then have an island of hair in the frontal top. There is no way to really have a stand alone procedure. There's also no such thing as having a HT while planning for the worst case scenario because worst case would be not being a candidate for a HT at all. If you look at people who are NW 7 (which would be worst cases) they are either not candidates or only candidates for a very thin and very high hairline. Generally a NW 3 person who is researching HTs already has the amount of hair on top that a NW 7 person gets after their transplant.